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We now know the Bureau of Statistics did quite a bit of soul-searching before producing the bland and ultimately misleading press release headed “Inequality Stable Since 2013-14” last month.

Late last week we pointed to the odd way in which the release included no data to back up that claim, and how journalists from the ABC and Sydney Morning Herald and Age quickly discovered that the statistics it purported to summarise actually showed wealth inequality climbing.

The striking feature is that every line except the Productivity Commission’s shows inequality increasing since 2011.

The data from both Credit Suisse (on which Oxfam bases its research) and the Evatt Foundation suggest that the top 10% now own more than half the nation’s household wealth, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s 47.2% is just a little less.

The Productivity Commission is an outlier in finding the top 10% own closer to 40%. Its finding that the share has been falling between 2013-14 and 2015-16 makes it even more of an outlier.

The Commission’s results are implausible

Our suspicions were aroused when the Productivity Commission’s results appeared to be incompatible with the Bureau’s published findings, of which they were a subset.

The Bureau’s data showed the share of wealth held by the top 20% climbing, while the Commission’s series showed the share held by the top 10% falling – implying that the share of the next top 10% must have been climbing quite a lot.

The divergence strained credulity. There are no advantages in accumulating wealth that apply to households in the second top decile that do not apply with at least equal force to those in the top decile.

Without an outside explanation (such as an extra tax applying only to the top 10%) the result is so improbable as to seem impossible.

Other data available from the Bureau at the time showed that the ratio of the wealth of households 10% from the top to the wealth of those 10% from the bottom had climbed, while at the same time the Commission found the wealth share of the top 10% overall had fallen.

Unfortunately, the Commission gave pride of place to its own findings over and above more conventional findings, and used a question mark in the title of its paper “Rising Inequality?” to imply that it might not be.

As we wrote here last week, wealth inequality and its effects matter. Australians need the truth about how much it is growing.